Take a look at this fun Under The Sea activity we did during the week. I’m not exaggerating when I say that this kept my 2-year-old occupied for TWO HOURS. This is one that I’ll be utilizing again for those moments when I just need her busy and out of my hair for a while!
Ice is easily one of the most affordable sensory play materials. It’s literally just water!
Not only is it cheap, but ice rescue play promotes:
- Imagination
- Fine motor skills
- Critical thinking (how do I get the frozen items out)
- Discovering hot vs. cold
Throw in an underwater theme and hidden sea creatures and you’ve got extra learning opportunities and endless summer fun!
How to prepare an Under The Sea Animal Rescue
The most basic idea here is that you have frozen small sea creatures in ice and your child has to figure out how to get them out.
Your set up can be as minimalistic or intricate as you would like to make it. There’s only a handful of things you really NEED for this activity.
Essentials
- A container to freeze water in
- Can be cute shaped ice cube trays or something as simple as a bread pan, muffin tins, paper cups, tupperware containers, etc
- Small objects to put in the ice
- because of my theme, I used small ocean animals. But you can use anything you have lying around the house. Some ideas: Marbles, bath toys, any small watersafe toys, flowers; pebbles; or leaves from outside… the possibilities are endless, just take a look around your house.
- 2 containers
- you will need one container to hold your ice and another to hold warm water. As you can see in my pictures, I used a plastic storage container for the warm water and the plastic lid to a disposable baking pan to hold the ice.
That’s really all that you have to have.
Now, knowing that you can take or leave any of my ideas, let’s go over the things that I used for our setup.
Our Supplies
Many of the things I’m listing I either already had or purchased locally. I will, however, find links for you to similar or same products for easy shopping…
(for now these are NOT affiliate links because Amazon kicked me from the program 🙂 But I suppose I’ll still link to them anyways, just for you. Eventually I’ll update this when they let me back in their club lol)
Scenery
To make this more “oceany” I wanted more than just ice cubes, so I went to the pet isle at the dollar store. There they had the fish tank greenery as well as the colored glass and the blue plastic pieces. The picture doesn’t show them well, but the blue ones kinda look like ice! I think just about any fish tank decor could be used to add some ambiance to an under the sea theme!
I also found the little net and bulb dropper thing with the pet stuff at the dolar store.
The under the sea animals
The little ocean creatures also came from the dollar store. They’re weird, squishy little toys. I was honestly hoping to find a pack of small, assorted plastic toys (you know the type, they’re small and cheap, you either get a safari pack, or farm animals, etc…) but these rubbery ones were all I could find for ocean animals. They worked just fine and I think Jane liked the texture.
Some cute sea animals I found on Amazon:
- Assorted plastic ocean creatures
- Small Rubber Fish (some of ours were like these)
Ice trays
I already had the ice trays that I used but I know Amazon has some really cute shapes available! I used 3 different ones for this: hexagons, starfish, and regular stars.
The starfish ice trays did not have little toys in them. It was just colored ice. Not all of the ice needs little toys, some of it can just be to add different shapes and extra ice to melt
As promised, here’s a few links I found:
- The silicone hexagon tray I have
- The Ikea starfish tray I have doesn’t seem to be available but I found this Ikea fish ice cube tray
- Silicone Star mold
- Super cute seashell ice molds
Containers
As I said above, I just used a plastic storage container and the clear plastic lid to a disposable baking pan. Both of which I had on hand.
Tools
I didn’t put this in the Essentials list because your child, realistically, can just use their hands. However, I do feel that giving them a few tools to use is an important aspect of this activity. Even something as simple as a kitchen mixing spoon to use to transfer the ice back and forth from the containers can help your child improve their concentration and fine motor skills. Plus it’s fun!
I gave Jane 4 tools
- A small fish tank net (found at the dollar store)
- Bulb, dropper, sqeeze thing (dollar store) (she loved using this to pipe the warm water onto the ice cubes)
- Funnel (to be honest, she didn’t use this at all during this activity)
- A small scoop (I think the little yellow one we used originally came with kinetic sand or playdough, something along those lines… But we use it for everything! I couldn’t find one like it but LOOK at this neat set that came up. No lie, I kinda want it.)
Food coloring
The last thing to mention is food coloring. I put 1 drop of liquid food color into each of the ice molds.
I used blue, green, and yellow and I do honestly regret using green. Blue and yellow make green, and green is green…. is was very green in the end when everything was melted.
If I do it again, I will probably use mostly blue and do some of them yellow just to add more color. That should make a bluer blue-green color that looks more oceany.
Setting up your Under The Sea Animal Rescue
Set up for this was super simple but it does require some amount of prep work
The day before
The hardest part is remembering to prep the day before you actually want to do this. It’s not an activity you can pull out on a whim when your child requests it. So step one is filling and freezing the ice molds the day before so that your sea creatures are trapped in solid ice.
Here’s how I did them:
- Put the ice trays onto a baking sheet (if you’re using hard plastic trays, you may not have to do this)
- Put the sea animals into the ice trays, one per slot.
- Fill them with water
- Put one drop of food coloring into each spot (I did NOT mix in the colors but instead let them settle to the bottom and I really like the way it made each ice cube look)
- Put the baking sheet with your ice trays into the freezer and leave them there until you are ready to do the activity.
The actual set up
We did this outside, it can definitely be done inside at a table or on the floor but you might want to lay out an extra towel or two.
I set this activity up on Jane’s little plastic picnic table. I set out a towel to cover the entire surface and set everything up on that. Spread out on the grass would have been just as good.
Get everything that you need together before taking the ice out of the freezer. That should be the last thing you do because you don’t want it melting before you start.
The basic order of things:
- Put the fish tank decor in the ice container and leave it on the counter
- Put the towel on the picnic table along with all the tools
- Fill the other container with hot tap water (not too hot) and put it on the picnic table
- Take the ice trays out of the freezer and empty them out into the ice container with all the fish tank decor and put it outside with everything else.
Let your child play
All that’s left is to let your child discover it!
I really want to stress that this is about letting your child DISCOVER, not showing them how to play. Kids don’t need to be taught how to play.
Sure, I showed Jane how the giant dropper thing works and I suggested she try the hot water when she was so focused on the cold ice that she hadn’t given the warm water any consideration. But it was minimal.
Sit back, watch your kid learn. Watch how they go about problem solving. It’s facsinating.
Like I said at the top of this post, this had her busy for hours! Long after the ice had all melted and the sea creatures were free, she continues to sit there sorting the colored glass, transfering water back and forth, examining the animals and asking me their names. She was learning (“Mom, do crabs have hands?”), she was busy, she was content. It was amazing.
Extra tip
If you want to prep the ice farther in advance you can freeze them and then transfer them to a freezer bag to save space in your freezer.
This is also a great idea if you want to leave them prepped and ready to go for those upredictable times that you need an activity for your kid and don’t have anything prepared. I myself, will be doing this for sure.
Reading back over this post, I feel like I have wayyy over explained this activity. I’m hoping too much is better than too little and you got some good ideas from this.
We LOVED this activity and I hope you and your kids do too.
If you give this a go, snap some pictures and tag me @thatmamachick in your Instagram post! I would love to see and I’ll feature you in my stories (with your permission of course)
If you are looking for more summer time activities for your littles, check out this color matching water balloon game! It’s buckets of fun!
